Don’t Live the Lie,
Boycott Itby John
Stantonwww.dissidentvoice.orgMay 2, 2004

There
seems little point in using the ballot box or electronic voting
machines to change the players in the White House, the US Congress
and, by extension, the Supreme Court, the federal bureaucracy and
the military. Funny how all those folks who are elected or appointed
in recent times “leave” government richer than when they started
whether measured in dollars, power or connections. And when these
officials take their positions in the business world, they use their
influence to alter legislation and regulations to favor the
organizations they represent. The elected/appointed and the
corporate/nonprofit worlds seem indistinguishable. The same person
who used to “protect and defend the constitution” might now be the
director on the board of the company that recommends that your
position be eliminated. And they never seem to fade away as fast as
they should.

These illustrious leaders are all tied together by their belief, as
Donald Rumsfeld put it, that all but the very few—meaning them—are
fungible, easily replaceable commodities. But give Rumsfeld and the
Republicans their due. They are just so totally Soviet in
their methodology--secretive, unapologetic, irresponsible,
dominating, absurd, dangerous and tragicomic—that even Stalin might
have raised an eyebrow at their ruthlessness.

Then there are the Democrats. These Perestroikians are supportive
of most of the Republican programs. While the Republicans use a
shock and awe approach to governance, the Democrats opt for a
cosmetic tact. The makeup they wear makes them appear to be the
defenders of the Bill of Rights, supporters of labor, and antiwar.
But once the makeup is removed, one finds that there’s a Republican
face underneath. The leading Democrat John Kerry believes that more
Americans, and presumably Europeans too, must die in Iraq. “I
believe that failure is not an option in Iraq,” he said recently.
And just how is failure being defined by Democrats these days?
Democrats have allowed a slew of individuals ranging from John
Ashcroft to John Negroponte to move to positions of great power in
the federal government. They have turned their heads while indicted
individuals in the Iran-Contra were appointed to diplomatic
positions within the US State department. They have sat idly by
while millions of Americans have lost work. They supported the
PATRIOT Act and US disengagement from treaty after treaty be it
environmental or involving limitations on children in war. And the
want the trust of the American people.

New Age Soviets

In a series of outrageous CYA moves, these new age Soviets,
America’s own senior Republicans and Democrats, ensured that not one
of them would face any consequences for the greatest
intelligence and military failure in history on September 11, 2001.
In like manner, they’ve ensured that not one of them will be
accountable for the lies that have led to the unnecessary carnage in
Iraq. But they will make sure someone in the lower level
echelons of the military and government, and society at-large, pays
for their malfeasance.

Both parties have polluted the national psyche with ever more
violence, as if the national psyche needed to become more violent.
Each day, through their friends in the media, a US military
commander, a politician, a commentator promotes more killing.
Capture and kill, capture and kill, fight to the end, fight to the
end, is the refrain whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, Colombia,
Pakistan, Haiti or right here in America where there is a War on
Terror, Drugs, Cancer, Crime, Poverty, Illiteracy and Hunger. This
is policy and practice taken right off of Metallica’s classic album
Kill “Em All.

But the reality is that Americans are mostly a non-violent people
opting for virtual violence—videogames, television, movies,
paintball, sports, argument—over the deadly business of warfighting.
The problem is that most Americans are not running the show.
They have no choice in the decision to go to war. That dubious
distinction is left to those friendly new age Soviets sitting pretty
in the White House, Congress and scores of offices throughout the
Pentagon and the federal bureaucracy. They love war but do
not like their minions in the homeland to see its consequences and
its many follies. They want you to think it’s virtual. Or
rather, they do not want the public to see the gooey remains
of men, women and children subjected to metal moving at high
velocity, prison photos of naked Iraqi men with abusive American
military guards, or any image that might make the grand conquerors
seem less-than-grand. Yet, it’s fine for them to show the dead
bodies of the opponent’s sons, the humiliating medical checkup of a
defeated ruler and the glorious strafing run of the Specter gunship.

Tragic and Comic

It’s tragicomic as you sit watching, via CNN or Al Jazeera, images
of explosions and tracer rounds in Falluja, Iraq as they—in
the form of a US general, tell you, “The ceasefire there is still in
place.” Huh? In another bit of tragicomedy, blogger
silenceisconsent reports that Bush stated in March of 2003 that “In
a free Iraq, there will be no more wars of aggression against your
neighbors, no more poison factories, no more executions of
dissidents, no more torture chambers or rape rooms. The tyrant will
soon be gone. The day of your liberation is near.” But didn’t CBS
News and then
Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker expose defense contractors Titan
and CACI and the US military for torture and forced rape at Abu
Ghraib? And who needs mass graves when US ordnance obliterate any
evidence of the thousands Iraqi civilians slaughtered by land, sea,
air and space? Once again, Republicans and Democrats have joined
hands to spin the news that this abuse is not representative of
grand old America and we must honor the rule of law. That from
representatives of a country that houses over two million inmates, a
percentage of which are not guilty.

And so, learning of the
incidents at Abu Ghraib, Democratic contender John Kerry stated
forcefully that "We must learn the facts and take the appropriate
action. As Americans, we must stand tall for the rule of law and
freedom everywhere." What rule of law is he referring to? It
certainly can’t be international law since the US does not adhere to
international law. It’s the same kind of statement his pal Bush
would make and it is every bit the reason why his campaign has
stalled. Millions are figuring out that there really isn’t all that
much difference between the two parties. While this daily routine of
lies unfolds on the computer or television screen, or in
conversation, one can not help but feel subjected to the frustrating
denial-anger-acceptance-regret loop that is common when dealing with
death and disease. Can insanity or capitulation be far behind?

Just Say No

Such is the twisted reality that is life here in America and that in
many respects approximates the political and cultural environment
that the people of Hungary, Poland and the former Czechoslovakia
were subjected to while under the heavy hand of the former USSR. But
as Jonathan Schell points out in the Unconquerable World, the
solution was very simple. “One of their most original achievements
was to discover a way to act and fight for more modest, immediate
goals without challenging the main structure of totalitarian power
head on.” Citing former Czechoslovakian Vaclav Havel’s 1978 essay
Living in Truth, Schell provides a hint at what approach Americans
might adopt to change a federal governing system over which they
currently have no control. And it is as simple as taking a look in
the mirror and thinking local. “Living in the truth stood in
opposition to living in the lie which meant living in obedience to
an oppressive regime…By living within the lie, that is, conforming
to the system’s demands, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the
system, make the system and become the system. A line of conflict is
then drawn through each person who is invited in the countless
decisions of daily life to choose between living in the truth and
living in the lie.”

Schell goes on to say that Havel rejected labels such as
“opposition” as too negative. That might be one of the first acts
that Americans undertake as they ditch a two party system that
conveniently provides for two labels: liberal and conservative.
“People who define themselves do so in relation to a prior position.
In other words they relate themselves specifically to the power that
rules society and through [that power] define themselves, deriving
their own position from the position of the regime. For people who
have simply decided to live within the truth, to say aloud what they
think, to express their solidarity with their fellow citizens, to
create as they want and simply to live in harmony with their better
self, it is naturally disagreeable to feel required to define their
own, original and positive position negatively…” or, for that
matter, so narrowly.

Thinking such as this over in Poland led to the formation of the
Worker’s Defense Committee, according to Schell. “Its purpose was to
give concrete assistance to workers in trouble with the
authorities—assistance that the organization referred to as social
work. Help was provided to the families of workers jailed by the
government. Independent underground publications multiplied. A
flying university which offered uncensored courses in people’s
apartments and other informal locations were founded. Organizations
devoted to social aims of all kinds—environmental, education,
artistic, legal—sprouted.”

Americans are certainly capable of breaking the stranglehold that
its new age Soviets have on the federal system of government. But it
will never happen through the electoral process. And it is easy to
call for the masses to rise and break the back of the capitalists.
But that is unrealistic. As Schell notes, leaders in countries
dominated by the former USSR knew that violent revolution and mass
protests would only harden the regime which possessed all the tools
of oppression—the military and the media chief among them. Such an
uprising would only harden the USSR’s response. Similarly, here in
the USA, those with the most to lose in the federal system,
entrenched Republicans and Democrats and their legions in the
bureaucracy, the military and the media--would respond the same way.
US history is replete with examples of college students, minorities
and unions killed or defamed for their refusal to live in the lie.

Boycott

Americans need to study the pages of Havel’s playbook and the look
at the structures of the Worker’s Defense Committee and stop living
in the lie. They might organize an array of boycotts aimed at
reducing the power of the federal system as it is operated today.
Oddly enough, the system is vulnerable where it appears
strongest—financially. It wouldn’t take much to rattle the economy
by boycotting corporations or nonprofits who perpetrate the lies on
a daily basis. Such an action, carried on at length, would send
corporate types running to their cohorts in Washington, DC to fix
the problem or, perhaps, it might stop the flow of campaign funds
from corporations to the very worst of the lot in any of the three
branches of government. The Internet makes the task more realistic
as groups could securely communicate the Boycott of the Month or
Year throughout the USA and the world. On the other hand, is their a
law against not buying something? What if 10 million Americans
stopped going to Walmart for three months? What if 20 million
Americans stopped watching Fox News for a year? You can bet your
last Euro that corporate executives would mob the US Congress and
the White House and take a look at the public’s demands.

And what if the residents of the 300 local American communities--who
have passed resolutions condemning the PATRIOT Act--formed their own
Worker Defense Committees and linked them together in a national
confederation. Might there be a way through such an alliance to help
the hungry, homeless, unemployed and, uninsured of the land? The
federal government, such as it is, certainly will not. Perhaps such
a group could provide an Internet and traveling version of the
flying classroom that provides non-censored history and economics
lessons to America’s children.

There is simply no way other way to change the federal system of
government as it is being operated by the current crew of
Republicans and Democrats, our very own homegrown Soviets. Fanciful?
Perhaps. But if Americans do not act soon and in some fashion, Ben
Franklin’s apocalyptic vision of totalitarian rule in America may
become a reality within the next few years. Speaking at the
Constitutional Convention on September 17, 1787, Franklin uttered
these words. “In these sentiments, Sir, I agree to this Constitution
with all its faults, if they are such; because I think a general
Government necessary for us, and there is no form of Government but
what may be a blessing to the people if well administered, and
believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a
course of years, and can only end in Despotism, as other forms have
done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need
despotic Government, being incapable of any other.